DOI article:
Benson, Eugene: Gabriele d'Annunzio: the new poet and his work
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.38746#0302
Gabriele d’Annunzio
298
consolations of art, and, with it, the higher worship of beauty.
Art is his creation, and with that he enchants us and beguiles
himself. When he treats of the sin of Moonlight and May,
when he describes his “Venus of sweet waters” in the heat and
mystery of the noonday, we are enchanted with beauty ; and we
feel with him the trouble and ecstacy of youth. When he ad-
dresses his old nurse, or returns to his home and walks in the
garden with his mother, or addresses his sister with words of
touching sweetness, we learn that the sacred charities of the
heart are known and felt. He is noble and patriotic when he
pours out the rolling music of his funeral ode to the dead admiral.
We recognise that he is master of every melody, and, if a pagan
still, a pagan to whom the solemnities of life have come, and who
gives himself to the experience appropriate to his years. But
yesterday, living according to the law of his members, concerning
himself, like the French novelists of the day, with the sensual
side of life, with things of sight, and sound, and touch, and smell ;
describing the experience, not of the soul or the mind, but of the
flesh, and in no way ashamed of any condition of it in life or
death. The Frenchman, the Italian, the Spaniard, in a word,
the Latin, studies a corpse, paints it, or a nude living body,
curious of form ; and for that he is as constant as we are for the
domesticities of life. Imagine the different results in art.
Both from Baudelaire and from d’Annunzio we get the de pro-
fundis like a far-off note, recalling the pains and anxieties of the
opium eater. The frenzies of passion that lead the heroes of his
romances to murder or suicide, in the poet himself evoke a cry
of despair. The ever reappearing paganism of youth gives place
to the spiritualism of the new man, born out of suffering, and we
hear the cry of a living soul after the confessions of the sensualist.
It is this evolution which separates d’Annunzio from the objec-
tive
298
consolations of art, and, with it, the higher worship of beauty.
Art is his creation, and with that he enchants us and beguiles
himself. When he treats of the sin of Moonlight and May,
when he describes his “Venus of sweet waters” in the heat and
mystery of the noonday, we are enchanted with beauty ; and we
feel with him the trouble and ecstacy of youth. When he ad-
dresses his old nurse, or returns to his home and walks in the
garden with his mother, or addresses his sister with words of
touching sweetness, we learn that the sacred charities of the
heart are known and felt. He is noble and patriotic when he
pours out the rolling music of his funeral ode to the dead admiral.
We recognise that he is master of every melody, and, if a pagan
still, a pagan to whom the solemnities of life have come, and who
gives himself to the experience appropriate to his years. But
yesterday, living according to the law of his members, concerning
himself, like the French novelists of the day, with the sensual
side of life, with things of sight, and sound, and touch, and smell ;
describing the experience, not of the soul or the mind, but of the
flesh, and in no way ashamed of any condition of it in life or
death. The Frenchman, the Italian, the Spaniard, in a word,
the Latin, studies a corpse, paints it, or a nude living body,
curious of form ; and for that he is as constant as we are for the
domesticities of life. Imagine the different results in art.
Both from Baudelaire and from d’Annunzio we get the de pro-
fundis like a far-off note, recalling the pains and anxieties of the
opium eater. The frenzies of passion that lead the heroes of his
romances to murder or suicide, in the poet himself evoke a cry
of despair. The ever reappearing paganism of youth gives place
to the spiritualism of the new man, born out of suffering, and we
hear the cry of a living soul after the confessions of the sensualist.
It is this evolution which separates d’Annunzio from the objec-
tive